Not So Little Women

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” -Louisa May Alcott

As a thirteen-year-old bookworm following in my feminist mother’s footsteps, I tossed aside white-gloved girl detective Nancy Drew and her ilk for pioneering female authors of an earlier age: the Victorians. The writing was lovely, but after plowing through a few of the classics, oh, how it rankled. Despite Jane Austen’s relatively high-minded Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (even though she ended up with über-hot Mr. Darcy), it still bugged the pants off me that these women were so…dull. They played the piano and did needlepoint. They spent a mind-numbing amount of time fussing with their frocks, nattering on about dances, and waiting, all that WAITING, to be introduced to men who might make suitable matches, after which they would probably die in childbirth or become young widows married off to skeevy dudes old enough to be their fathers because everyone knew they could not possibly survive without a Y chromosome in the house.

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2 thoughts on “Not So Little Women”

Women–characters–caught in their time. I wonder how the future generations will view females and their roles in this century? I’d love to read a blog from the future about us. Stopped in from Indies Unlimited to say hi.

Hi, cleemckenzie, nice to hear from you. I wonder about that, too, sometimes. Will the pendulum swing back to the days of churning butter, with modern women shaking their heads at their predecessors? Interesting.